Re: A Great Idea (tm) about reimplementing NLS.

[Patrick McFarland <pmcfarland@downeast.net>]

On Wednesday 15 June 2005 04:26 am, Lukasz Stelmach wrote:
> Måns Rullgård napisał(a):
> > I use utf-8 exclusively for my filenames (the few that are not 7-bit
> > ascii).  Forcing others who use the system to do the same would cause
> > them a lot of trouble, as they must transfer files to and from Windows
> > machines that use anything but utf-8.
>
> But VFAT (and NTFS???) use unicode, i.e. UTF-16 (???). AFAIK

No, VFAT and NTFS use an 8-bit encoding, and I think its only NTFS5 that is 
forced to only use UTF-8 as the encoding (vfat can use any 8-bit encoding, 
and NTFS4 afaik can as well, and I don't think NTFS5 uses UTF-16 internally),

Forcing people to use unicode isn't a bad thing btw, especially since it is a 
culture agnostic encoding that can represent wide characters (eg. from Asian 
languages) in a uniform manner*, and allowing to use multiple languages (eg. 
Chinese and Japanese) at once without needing to switch encodings.

This also means it fixes the 'bug' where you have multiple encodings for the 
same language (ie. JIS, SJIS, and EUC_JP; similarly, simplified Chinese has 5 
popular encoding methods, and traditional Chinese as three), which allows 
easier sharing of data between users without needing to muck with encoding.

* Unicode can do so in UTF-8 as well as UTF-16 to describe the entire 20-bit 
space.

-- 
Patrick "Diablo-D3" McFarland || pmcfarland@downeast.net
"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd 
all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to
repetitive electronic music." -- Kristian Wilson, Nintendo, Inc, 1989

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